Tricks of the Desert

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Tricks of the Desert

Friday 14/02 - Mon 18/02/08

Farewell, Tam Dao mountain. Farewell to freezing my goddamn ass off. I have never, ever, felt as cold as I did in that desolate, dismal place, not even in my darkest moments. At this point, the team fractures and splits. First, Craig and Gregg decide to go to Hanoi for a weekend on the piss. I'm so very close to joining them, but have a lot of shit to organise, so bail out. I'd love to tell the story of their two weird and fucked up days, but I wasn't there, so it wouldn't be right. Just stay away from those gypsy queens when the moon is high and your blood is up.

The rest of us make a brief stop at an old Vietnamese village. It's festival time, so we're treated to a local delight - cock fighting. It's a pretty sickening spectacle. The cocks are raised and bred specifically to fight, and go at it hammer and tong, clawing at each other's bellies with their feet, and slamming their heads together, rendering their faces a red, swollen mess. I watch for a few minutes and then walk away. We spend a bit of time visiting families in the village, some of whom live in houses 900 years old. We stop at an old Pagoda, and then hit the road back to our hotel in Yen Bai.

I spend the weekend regretting not going to Hanoi. Kat leaves for a week of teaching, and the two ra-ra's fuck off at last, deciding that Vietnam is not for them, and heading to Thailand two weeks early. We'll miss you ladies, we really, really will. Highlight of weekend - watching a game of English FA Cup football in my hotel room. Man Utd beat Arsenal, and I drink a six pack of Hanoi Beer in solitude.

Monday. We catch a train to Lao Cai, a town near the Chinese border in north-west Vietnam. From there, we are taken by bus to the town of Sapa. Sapa is a popular tourist destination due to its location in the Hoang Lien Son mountain range, and is home to a number of Vietnamese minority tribes, including the Black H'mong and Red Dzao. The town itself is a tight-knit collection of tourist shops, hotels, internet cafes and restaurants. The streets are lined with tourists, irritating fuck-ups dressed up in expensive hiking gear, all too keen to trample all over the people's land, and piss all over their culture.

Love it or hate it, the tourists are what make these people rich. For every foreigner, there are two three minority women, selling their wears along the roadsides. They come at you in packs, like Raptor, encouraging you to delve deep into their baskets and purchase whatever it is you can pull out. "You buy for me?" is their battle cry. "I have no need" the usual response. In the afternoon, we trek down to a waterfall and back. Along the way, we pass a bar, called Pink Floyd. The female proprietor calls out to us, and we promise to return.

Night. The three musketeers venture out. We stop for one beer a pub, recommended in some Lonely Planet or Rough Guide book. As far as we can tell, it's a lifeless shit hole and a waste of our time, so we drink up quick. Next stop, Pink Floyd. The owner is a strange woman, named Ly (if my memory is correct). She is apparently a fan of the band Pink Floyd, and so their music plays constantly in the background. Hearing her speak, I wonder if a lifetime of listening to psychedelic rock has done something to her mind, as she seems to be acutely psychotic. She babbles incoherently about her friend Mr Ben, who would sometimes come in, only to decide he preferred it outside, only to later come in again. If I could, I would have strapped her down and administered a heavy course of electric shock therapy to bring her out of it, but such measures are beyond my qualifications as a mental health professional.

We sit outside next to a fire, drinking and talking to Ly. Earlier, we bought a large bag of weed from one of the minority women, and we start to smoke a bit of that. We're short on skins, though, so Craig goes inside and asks two guys sitting at a table if they have any. Next thing we know, we're joined by the fire by two tall Israeli's. They have both skins and a bit of what they think is hash, and they smoke with us for a while. We're also joined by Chet, Ly's cook. Chet doesn't appear to be the brightest of fellows, and once he gets involved in the chronic, his faculties are dimmed further. We smoke both joints and out of Chet's large tobacco bong, known as a Thuc Lao.

One of the Israeli's plays guitar pretty well, and hammers out a few good tunes to break the monotony of too much Pink Floyd. I like this guy. He seems okay, and we're disappointed when he decides to go to bed at 10pm. No stamina. No class. His friend, on the other hand, we'd happily see off. This guy is the worst kind of prick, a travelling fountain of wisdom who thinks he knows it all just because he lives in a colourful part of the world. We get into a conversation about cultures, and about Palestine. We put across the viewpoint that any culture that encourages and practices honour killing is pretty fucked up; that executing your daughter because she married the wrong kinda guy might be seen as something of a overreaction. He does not agree. He informs us that you have to live amongst a people, as he does, to fully understand their way of life. He tells us we should not condemn, rather seek to slowly re-educate.

I suggest that, following his logic, if a communitie's culture was one of pedophilia, should we then refrain from judgment there also. I put it to him that honour killing is far from widely accepted, and often condemned from within the culture that practices it, in the same way that in India, steps are being taken by Indians to prevent child marriages and discrimination against women. The dumb Israeli fuck seems to think that if there were a whole town made up of pedophiles, he would find it hard to tell them what they do is wrong. He also seems a little put out that we have challenged his way of thinking. Fucking cocksucker. If I lived next to a community of child molesters, I would have no problem pointing out the error of their ways, and if honour-killing fucks were living on my doorstep, not his, I wouldn't hide behind pretentious, attention-grabbing statements, and show a little backbone.

Chet has moved indoors now, leaving just the four of us. He has become engrossed in one of the Mr Bean movies, and is in fits of laughter, his viewing perhaps enhanced by the heavy dose of weed we bestowed upon him. The Israeli continues to grind my gears. The fire is dying, and we make attempts to re-light it by blowing on the embers. When we don't succeed, the cocksucker leans forward. He exhales, and the flames spring back to life. He sits back, a self-satisfied grin across his face. "Tricks of the desert, my friends, tricks of the desert."

Indeed. Blowing air onto fire. Clearly, a skill only ever acquired by those afforded a desert upbringing. While the rest of the world spends inordinate amounts of time and money on complicated wind machines, or sits around their log fires with furrowed brows, praying that the moment never comes when the flames lie low and they are dumbstruck, open-mouthed, unable to fathom what an earth to do to bring them back from the dead, the desert-dwellers are dancing around huge furnaces that reach for the sky, laughing at our stupidity, counting their blessings for a childhood spent learning the deadly art of using your lung capacity to fuel a fire. Mother-fucker. If I had a knife, I'd fucking cut him.

Luckily, we don't have to put up with much more of his shit. He follows his friends off to bed, and we curse his name into the darkness. He leaves behind his skins, and the "hash", which is in fact sticky, black opium. We already have a small supply of this, given to us by the H'mong lady that sold us our weed. Save it for a rainy day. We're hungry, so we call upon Chet to rustle us up some burgers. He disappears down to the kitchen, and starts to pound the shit out of something, like a mad, stoned fool. A good while later, he returns with three burgers, all red-raw in the middle. We're too far gone to really care, though I do try to eat around the worst bits.

We leave Pink Floyd. The hour is late, and we must away. A thick fog has come down, and an eerie silence creeps out from behind the tendrils of mist. We are all pretty wasted. There is nobody else around. Everyone is hiding under their covers. Everyone hears our footsteps, and they tremble. We pass shops, and blank-faced mannequins stare out at us, their cold, black eyes hungry for a piece of our souls. We huddle together for protection and march on, laughing at danger. We zigzag downhill along the pathway, dodging the spooks, and reach the hotel safely. The door has been locked, but we took precautions, and have the phone number. After several minutes of ringing, somebody emerges to let us in. We thank him, and then climb nosily up the stares.

Goodnight to all the desert people. Goodnight to all those miserable fucks - may they sleep with clear consciences, and their secrets held close to their hearts.

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